WHY THE NEED FOR CREEDS - PART 4

The No-Creed View Can Make Dictators of Pastors

As mentioned above, the anti-creed attitude reflects the spirit of the age, which is dead set against authorities and historical tradition.

However, not having a public creed, which sets the bounds for the essentials of the Faith, then anything goes for the pastor. A popular response might be, “No! Our pastor only preaches the Bible!” The fact is that, their pastor preaches what his personal understanding of what the Bible means.

So, if a church has “No book/creed but the Bible!” and the pastor is the best trained person to interpret the Bible, then what the pastor says the Bible means will be the most authoritative voice in that church. Without a creed, the members of the church have nothing against which they can check whether what their pastor is saying is true or not.

Taken to its logical end, without a public creed, the pastor is the ultimate authority!

If the pastor best knows what the Bible teaches, and there arises a question of doctrine or life, then what the pastor says is the last word on the issue. On the flip side, if a church has a public creed and confession, the other elders or even members of the church have a standard or rule by which they can test the teaching.

In I John 4:1, the apostle John says, “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits (i.e., teachings, messages) to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world” (ESV).

In the very next verse (v. 2), the Apostle then goes on to give the standard by which the teachings are to be evaluated. In this, he gives us a creed, a confession!! “By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God” (ESV). This statement functioned as a creed, over against the group in the church known as the Gnostics, which denied that the man Jesus was the Christ. Rather, they taught that the Christ was pure spirit that used the mere human Jesus of Nazareth as a sort of vehicle, as he cruised around teaching those in the know how to escape earthly reality. The Apostle teaches us to reject Gnosticism, since it contradicts our confession of Christ, “conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary...etc.,” that is, Christ’s incarnation.

So, just like the apostle John prescribed, public creeds function to test the claims of those who are responsible to teach and rule in the church. 

  

Wrapping It Up

Despite how popular the sloganeering claims of “No creed but...” are in today’s church culture, they are something that may work on a bumper sticker, but cannot stand against logic, the Bible, church history. This attitude also creates dysfunction in the life of the church.

In summary:

            1. “No creed but...” is self-refuting, because “No creed...” is a creed!

2. “No book but the Bible” is a claim that is against the teaching of the Bible, because the Bible is full of creeds and teaches us to maintain them.

3. The fact is that, everyone has a creed, whether it is public or private!

4. The private-creed view can lead to the pastor becoming a dictator, since there is no standard by which to test the pastor’s interpretation of the Bible.

How good is God, that he has graciously worked the thought, circumstances, theology and history of his church to hand down to us—and future generations—the ancient creeds, confessions, and catechisms, which have shaped who we are and remind us of our rich and deep heritage, going back to Christ’s apostles! Let us pray that as he nurtures our appreciation and use of the creeds, he likewise give us the grace to help lead the church in a faithful trip back to the future, and in her seeing the need for creeds!

Presuppositional Primer by Martin Jones

For anyone wanting to more capably and confidently defend the Christian worldview and commend the saving faith of Christ, I would recommend Martin Jones’ “The Futility of Non-Christian Thought.”  It is a great primer on the faithful apologetical approach of presuppositionalism, which posits Christ’s self-attesting Word as the final criterion of knowledge in all spheres of human experience.  Here is the opening paragraph.

Biblical Christianity, properly defined in terms of classical Protestantism, offers a radical philosophical critique of non-Christian thought. This Christian critique is radical in the sense that it challenges the very core of non-Christian pretensions and demonstrates that non-Christian thought, whether atheistic, agnostic, or religious, ultimately destroys rationality, science, ethics, and every other aspect of human experience. Continue reading...here.

Pride, in the name of sin and nihilism

What is the root of all actual, personal sins?  What is the source of nihilism?  Hear Augustine on the matter. 

“Now, could anything but pride have been the start of the evil will?  For ‘pride is the start of every kind of sin’ (Ecclus. 10:13).  And what is pride except a longing for a perverse kind of exaltation?  For it is a perverse kind of exaltation to abandon the basis on which the mind should be firmly fixed, and to become, as it were, based on oneself, and so remain.  This happens when a man is too pleased with himself: and a man is self-complacent when he deserts that changeless Good in which, rather than in himself, he ought to have found his satisfaction…And so, to abandon God and to exist in oneself, that is to please oneself, is not immediately to lose all being; but it is to come nearer to nothingness”

City of God, Book XIV, Ch. 13   

Three Views on Apologetics

In defending the Christian faith, believers should be aware of the three general approaches to apologetics, and which method is the most consistent with that faith.  The three approaches are the classical, the evidential, and the presuppositional methods.  First, there is the classical method, which operates on a form of rationalism.  Generally speaking, rationalism maintains that, beginning with self-evident truths and applying the laws of logic, the human mind can arrive at epistemic certainty by deduction.  Additionally, the legitimacy of natural theology is assumed; that is, that man can begin with general human experience alone and arrive at an accurate understanding of God, the world, and man’s relation to both.  Moreover, classical apologetics presupposes that the reprobate mind is neutral toward God’s truth, and functions properly independent of God (contra, Jn. 3:19; Rom. 8:7; Eph. 4:17—19).  Classical apologetics, then, appeals to human autonomy as the source of ultimate authority.  Secondly, evidential apologetics, or evidentialism, is similar to the classical view.  However, evidentialism begins with the presupposition of empiricism rather than rationalism.  Empiricism supposes the validity of sense perceptions; and, applying induction and verification, man can arrive at true knowledge.  Similarly too, evidentialism makes its final court of appeal the authority of autonomous human reason.  Lastly, presuppositional apologetics, or presuppositionalism, works on the epistemological presupposition of revelation, that of Christ and the Scriptures.  Because unbelievers suppress the truth of God clearly and authoritatively revealed in the natural world, the Scriptures are required as corrective lenses for reinterpreting natural revelation after God (see Rom. 1:18ff;).  Presuppositionalism does not rely on human wisdom to persuade the unbeliever.  Rather it rests on the foolishness of the cross and the saving, regenerating grace of the Holy Spirit, without which no one can believe (1 Cor. 1:18—25; 2:14).  Presuppositionalism makes the self-attesting Word of Christ its final authority, seeking to bring the sinner’s intellect in submission to the Lordship of God in Christ.  Classical and evidential apologetics suggest that human reason is competent to authoritatively judge the veracity of Christ and his Word.  Therefore, of the three approaches to apologetics, presuppositionalism is most consistent with the faith that Christians are defending.    

Creator/creature distinction in the Anthropology of Irenaeus

“People...who attribute the weakness of their nature to God are completely unreasonable. They understand neither God nor themselves; they are ungrateful and never satisfied. At the outset they refuse to be what they were made: human beings who are subject to passions. They override the law of human nature; they already want to like God the Creator before they even become human beings. They want to do away with all the differences between the uncreated God and created humans. Thus they are more unreasonable than the dumb animals.”

Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies, IV:38:4

AVOIDING PRESUPPOSITIONALISM

“Therefore I still contend with you, declares Yahweh, and with you children’s children I will contend. For cross to the coasts of Cyprus and see, or send to Kedar and examine with care; see if there has been such a thing. Has a nation changed its gods, even though they are no gods? But my people have changed their glory for that which does not profit. Be appalled, O heavens, at this; be shocked, be utterly desolate, declares Yahweh” (Jer 2:9—12).

With these words, Yahweh is wondering at the fact that the nations, who worship non-Gods, are incorrigibly faithful to their non-God idols, while Israel, a spectacle in ‘comparative religions,’ is seemingly predisposed to abandoning the Rock of their refuge and hope, Yahweh. Geerhardus Vos makes the following observation in Biblical Theology:

“Jeremiah complains that Israel is more inclined to change its God than the heathen nations. It is not difficult to explain this. The pagan nations had no desire to change, because their religion was the natural expression of their disposition. Israel persistently struggled to throw off the yoke of Jehovah’s service, because the old pagan nature of Israel felt it as a yoke” (1983, 62).

Are we today decidedly immune from Jeremiah’s marveling? Does our “old pagan nature” cause us to throw of the Lordship of Christ’s rule, while the actual pagans are thoroughly consistent and staunch in their ultimate commitments? Sadly, at times, especially when discussing apologetics, we must answer yes.

The archetypical sin of our first parents in the garden was based on the assumption that humans can reason rightly and interpret reality properly independent of God’s verbal revelation. They believed under the influence of the serpent, that God’s Word was unclear and his knowledge of things was indeterminate, for the whole question was whether or not the judgment of death would actually follow their snatching the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Disregarding the Creator-creature relationship, they decided to conduct an empirical analysis of the claims of the Creator; they held God’s knowledge and creaturely knowledge to be co-equal. Thus, it was believed that, man could reason according to logical laws and empirical observations and come to a true knowledge of God, themselves and their world, all-independent of the Word of God.

This, as we well know, both propositionally and experientially, had disastrous, cosmic, and eternal results. If this were the case when man was in a state of righteousness—in need of God’s revelation for proper reinterpretation of things and that reasoning independent of God’s Word brings ruinous consequences—how much more now, east of Eden, being radically depraved?

Presuppositionalists aptly describe this independence from God, particularly in the area of epistemology, as striving for autonomy. Bahnsen defines the term autonomy thus: “’Autonomy’ refers to being a law unto oneself, so that one’s thinking is independent of any outside authority, including God’s. Autonomous reasoning takes itself philosophically as the final reference and interpretation, the ultimate court of intellectual appeal; it presumes to be self-governing, self-determinative, and self-directing” (Van Til’s Apologetic, 1 fn. 2).

We see, then, that traditional apologists must delineate their apologetic method from their theological conclusions. As far as their theology is biblically faithful and historically orthodox, their apologetical assumptions are inconsistent with their theology. On the one hand, they would affirm that all that’s bound up in Bahnsen’s definition of autonomy could be appropriately ascribed to God alone. In apologetic practice, however, traditional methods afford and even foster the non-Christians in their fallen desire and struggle for autonomy. Traditionalists seek to satisfy the non-Christian’s struggle for autonomy by feeding their insatiable insistence for scientific evidences, philosophical and logical proofs, and demonstrations of the Bible’s ethics that fit their own sinful emotivism. Submitting one’s thinking, in faith, to the Lordship of Christ as the Light that gives us light to see anything aright (Ps 36:9), is, for them, something that comes at the end of the apologetic encounter; this act of repentance is seen strictly as evangelistic and posterior to apologetics.

Herein lays the analogy to Jeremiah’s charge: The adherents of non-Christian systems of thought are more faithful to their epistemological authorities, since these are merely an expressed manifestation of their commitment to their own autonomy. But Christ’s people are quick to exchange their glory—i.e., Christ’s epistemological Lordship—for that which does not profit, the futile, darkened epistemological autonomy of man.

Presuppositionalism doesn’t make any clear distinctions between apologetics and evangelism, for this apologetic is hardly more than a relentless challenge to the non-Christian’s sinful, white-knuckled claim to intellectual autonomy, and seeking to see this taken captive to obey Christ. Furthermore, presuppositionalists are willing confessors of Christ: that their believing obedience to him rests not in some linear, valid line of reason; their submission to Christ is the result of the Holy Spirit graciously regenerating them so that they proudly stand under the gentle-light yoke of Christ’s rule over them, especially their minds. They contend that, since surrender to God and his wisdom is the beginning, not the end, of knowledge (Prov 1:7), and that the unbeliever’s mind is at enmity with God, there must therefore be a frontal assault on the unbeliever’s epistemological autonomy, and at once an appeal to repentance from their idols of a depraved mind. Autonomous reason can never lead one to Christ; it must be recognized for what it really is—the very sin that is in constant rebellion to God and refuses to surrender to the Savior.

With Jeremiah, the presuppositionalist wonders at the traditional apologetic, how it exchanges the glory of Christ’s epistemic Lordship for the unprofitable would-be authority of autonomous human reason. With Tertullian, we agree, “It must...be added, that no solution may be found by any man, but such as is learned from God; and that which is learned of God is the sum and substance of the whole thing” (On the Soul, II). And finally, with the Master himself, who declares that, no one can serve two masters (Matt 6:24).

Presuppositionalism strips human reason of its would-be autonomy; our old nature still struggles (or oftimes surrenders to) for its autonomy. Perhaps this, then, is one of the main reasons for avoiding presuppositional apologetics.

For an example of APPLYING PRESUPPOSITIONALISM click here.